A Nearly Perfect Copy (6 page)

“Seriously, man. I mean, you won the student choice award at the École. You have massive talent. It’ll happen for you. Hey, have you ever sent de Treu your slides? You know, he reps Gutierrez, he might like your stuff.”

Gabriel was often compared to Gutierrez, a Spanish abstract imagist whose artwork bore nothing in common with Gabriel’s.

“I’m not really ready,” Gabriel said. “I’m transitioning.” Gabriel never sent out his slides. He considered it akin to hawking his wares on a street corner.

“Come on, man. You gotta put yourself out there. Otherwise, it’s like some previous century dream of poverty and burning canvas to stay warm. There’s no noble artist anymore, no purity. There’re just working artists, and that’s us, so we work it.”

Didier patted his pockets to make sure his lighter was secure. “I gotta head back in. Take care, man.” He clapped Gabriel on the back twice and made his way inside.

Gabriel waited a minute, then followed. Inside, he wound around the maze of walls, the clip lights throwing harsh shadows. It was cold in the studio. Space heaters brought little warmth and tended to blow the electric lines. Fires were sometimes started in barrels, hobo style, but often smoked more than warmed, and tended to draw attention. Usually, the starving artists slaved away in the cold, wearing an unofficial uniform of scarves and fingerless gloves.

When Gabriel came to his area, it was dark and shadowed. A silhouette of a chair, the can of turpentine, a bouquet of brushes. He stood in the gloom for a moment and looked at his painting. He was painting large scale, much larger than he had at school. Édouard lent him stretchers; canvas was not too expensive; he mixed his own gesso. His paintings were Classical Realist, an evolution of the atelier method taught at the École. They usually showed public French spaces occupied by dozens of French figures who were not French: gypsies, Africans, Arabs.

After graduation, he thought he had left painting forever. In the rush of new technology, the increased digitalization of the world, he began a series of video installations. There was so much money at the end of the nineties that patrons practically gave him equipment and walls on which to project his art. He’d worked with a computer programmer, synchronizing screens and creating sound pieces to accompany them. But then everyone started manipulating video. His work became passé.

So he revisited his thesis, a series of canvases. They seemed to him now to show talent, a skill for color and composition, but they were also naïve, the work of someone who had yet to live in the real world. He was not embarrassed by them, but it was like looking at someone else’s work.

Occasionally he could conjure up that young, idealistic person again, but only in the realm of memory, swift flashes of sentiment that left as quickly as they arrived. He had changed, yes. Had he grown?

He’d spent a year away from his studio. It made him anxious to hear the industry of all the others in the space. He drank more than he should have. His right motorcycle boot developed a hole that the Russian cobbler couldn’t repair. And then one day he felt like painting again, and he went back to the studio, where nothing had changed, really, everyone still tossing paint at the wall or plastic in the mold, ending up with an anti-aesthetic, ugly and formless. He was rusty. He tried not to judge himself too harshly, but the inner critic was loud and unforgiving.

It took him six months to paint something halfway decent. Another year to perfect his canvas preparation technique (he liked a surface as smooth as poured resin, a process that required endless gesso and sandpaper).

Now Gabriel lined up his tubes of paint. He didn’t feel like painting tonight. He felt like lying on a couch and watching an old John Wayne movie on television. He felt like sitting in his mother’s kitchen watching her fry
morcilla
, hovering above the hearth like a medieval archangel. But he had no television (nor couch, for that matter) and his mother had been dead for a decade. He longed for a home, and that made him angry with himself. An artist thrived on imbalance, on the edge of deprivation, which made him strive for more. Comfort bred complacency. He leaned against the studio wall, which bowed under his meager weight. He straightened, steadied the wall.

This painting wasn’t done, but he wasn’t sure why. It was like a sentence left trailing off. It was like his French: fine, but not eloquent, not quite right. He was calling it
La Gare
, and it was simply the corner of a nonspecific railway station, a gypsy beggar and a woman having a nervous smoke. He was trying to work mostly with a gray palette, branching out into olives and mauves, but the subjects refused to blend adequately, almost like he had cut out and collaged separate paintings. There was something unfluid about his work. Gabriel’s professor at the École had called it “brutal.” The gallerist he’d convinced to pay a studio visit said it felt “unfiltered, diffuse.” But it wasn’t that. The canvas was somehow always present in his work. Like a helium balloon tethered to a chair, it was never able to transcend its medium.

When Gabriel was stuck, he liked to copy paintings in his sketchbook.
He opened the dog-eared coffee table book he’d bought off the
quai
for ten euros at the end of a long, rainy day. A plate of Canaletto’s
The Feast Day of St. Roch
was most interesting because of the trio of figures standing along the canal edge. Though blurry, there was a naturalness to their poses; something had caught their eyes while they were busy with other tasks. A man in robes, two women, one of whom was carrying her shopping. Quickly, Gabriel got absorbed, picking up his pencil and sketchbook. He sat on the high stool and began to draw. He sketched the form of the man, his female neighbor next.

He hummed nearly silently, “The doge is coming, the doge is coming,” to remember why the figures were staring at the palace, though nothing was happening. “The doge is visiting. It is an important day, a day to keep heads up and eyes bright. A day to shade foreheads to see farther in the setting sun.” Gabriel sketched a sharp shadow, a raised flat hand. “The robes swirl in a sudden gust of wind. The sleeves of the woman puff and undulate. She clutches her basket. She has purchased … a chicken and …”

His own preparatory sketches looked anemic, incomplete, yet this one, in Canaletto’s style, for Canaletto’s painting, that had already been long completed, was alive. The lines were fluid, like Canaletto’s, the hand sure, the graphite thick. This was not the way art was done. This was backward, drawing sketches of museum pieces would get him nowhere but the weekend swap at the
marché aux puces
.

Disgusted, Gabriel lit a piece of incense, aware that if Marie-Laure were here, she’d yell over the partition. He felt constricted—roommates, studio-mates, boss, even his fucking pants were too tight. Fuck mother-fucking Canaletto.

Sure enough, Marie-Laure’s tight soprano summited the corrugated walls. “We agreed you wouldn’t light that in here,” she said. “You know it bothers my lungs.”

And yet the turpentine and oil paints and fixative are mountain air, Gabriel thought. Out loud he said, “Sorry.”

His phone vibrated. It was a text message, which he had to hold far from his face to read the small letters. “What’s up?” it read.

It took him several minutes to type out, “Who is this?” Why did everyone think texting was so much faster than calling? He could not get his phone to put in the correct accent marks.

“Colette :)”

Was that a sideways smiley face? Still, he sat up straighter. This was an interesting development.

“What are you up to?”

He tried to make his fingers hit the small keys, but he kept passing up letters and turning them into numbers. Without meaning to, he pressed call.

By the time he realized what he’d done it was too late. Colette answered on the fourth ring. She sounded out of breath.

“Hi,” he said. “It’s me.”

“Hello?” Colette said. “Who’s this?”

“Gabriel,” he identified himself.

“Oh, hi!” she said. She was someplace loud. The gym? A restaurant? A train station? His left hand worried the seam of his jeans against his thigh.

Colette let the silence sit over the phone. She was obviously not going to help him. But why would she have contacted him if she didn’t want to see him?

“Would you like to have dinner?” he asked.

“Sure,” Colette answered quickly. “When?”

“Um, I don’t know. Tonight?” Gabriel said. There was a silence. Gabriel closed his eyes, though it felt like it was brighter behind his lids. Why was he so awkward? Had it been so long since he’d asked someone out?

“Yeah, okay, sure. Where do you want to meet?”

Gabriel ran through a mental log of places he’d eaten before. They were few. The couscous place near school. That place he passed by on his way to the
métro
. Very French: candles and boars’ heads and lots of silverware. Finally, he named a touristy brasserie where he’d never eaten.

Colette laughed. “You’re hilarious.”

Gabriel laughed as well, as though he’d meant to make a joke. “You decide.”

She said, “La Tour de L’Oqueau,” and named an address.

Gabriel hung up, elated. There was nothing to do to clean up, no paints to cover, no chemicals to dispose of. Just put the pencil back into the box and close the coffee table book. It was like Gabriel was never even there.

Elm’s colleague Ian had investigated the Attic and returned with some postcard-sized oils and accompanying drawings of the Hudson River School. Whittredge, not Elm’s favorite, but still name enough to draw the Hudson River Rats out of the proverbial woodwork for the fall auctions. Elm asked Ian to do the legwork—confirm the provenance, send the pieces to the authenticator, investigate potential reserves. The Hudson River School was in a minor resurgence—there’d been a secondary exhibit at the Fogg that reacquainted the public with its existence.

It was only later that day that she realized she had not asked to see the paintings or drawings for herself. This lack of curiosity, she knew, was a symptom of the depression she’d been suffering since Ronan died. She stopped being interested in things not directly affecting her immediate circumstances. She’d lost all natural curiosity: What’s behind that door? What did that person mean? How does wireless work? And here she was, a supposed expert, a presumed devotee, who sent the drawings directly to the lab, to science, when she probably could have told just by looking at them whether they were forged, misattributed, or the real McCoy.

Elm was a keen judge of drawings, etchings, lithographs, and all prints prior to the twentieth century. She wished she could trust Ian’s eye, but they had both agreed, after a couple of martinis at the Algonquin Hotel one night, that Ian’s talents lay in client relations—in selling or commissioning art, not in appreciating it. He admired it, adored it even, loved being around it, took an aesthete’s pleasure in viewing it. But he lacked that critical and ineluctable something that allowed a viewer
to hear a painting speak—the “eye.” Elm had it, a way of seeing through a painting or drawing, of gathering in an instant its myriad qualities, good or bad, and forming an almost infallible judgment. No amount of study or exposure could teach you the eye if you weren’t born with it. And while it wasn’t necessary to have the eye to work in art (many collectors, gallerists, and even some artists lacked it and were successful), it was essential for a director. Ian would grow and deepen, certainly, gain a greater store of knowledge from which to draw comparisons, but he would always be hobbled by his dead eye.

Elm’s eye, on the other hand, had been honed since birth, growing up her whole life around Tinsley’s with its revolving museum-like galleries. She looked at the drawings, let her gaze soften, and became, just for the moment, the artist himself. Apart from her acquired knowledge about paper, materials, subject matter, and style, she could effect this transubstantiation. That and her position at Tinsley’s led to her acknowledged preeminence in the field.

Ian poked his head through her door, then came in and sat down without waiting for an invitation. “So, up near Columbia, right?” he said. It took Elm a minute to figure out he was talking about his visit to the Attic. “Picture one of those old buildings that has housed academics for the past couple hundred years. The lobby’s marble has grooves between door and mailboxes and stairs. The elevator—unspeakable. I took the stairs, of course. Fifth floor. I knock. There’s no answer. But I’d made an appointment with the caregiver. Finally, a shuffling noise, and the door creaks open, straight out of some Bela Lugosi film. This woman, one hundred years old, skin hanging off in folds, some nightmare of old age, answers the door and without speaking waves me in.”

Here Ian paused for effect. Elm loved his stories the way Moira loved being read to at night. She wanted to hear them over and over again, revel in the inconsistencies, in their slight variations.

“So I walk into this apartment, and I swear it is unchanged from 1940. I half-expected to see Marlene Dietrich waltz in from stage right. Not only that, it hasn’t been cleaned since then either. And piles and piles of stuff—newspapers, folders, advertisements, boxes, envelopes. Just like the those brothers … What’s their names?”

“The Collyer brothers,” Elm filled in. They were part of New York lore, the brothers who saved every newspaper for fifty years and then died inside their prison of newsprint.

“Right. Complete with the paths between piles from kitchen to bedroom to toilet.”

“Just like the marble grooves in the lobby.”

“Don’t throw my storytelling inadequacies back at me. What, Homer never repeated an epithet?”

“Sorry,” Elm said. She leaned forward and put her chin in her hands, pantomiming rapt attention. “Pray, continue.”

“She still hasn’t spoken to me, but we go into the bedroom, where a wan light is shining through the windows, illuminating the dust motes.”

“Poetic,” said Elm.

Ian ignored her. “And then she points to the drawings, which are in a Woolworth’s shopping bag, circa, say, 1920. And I’m wondering if the bag is the artifact she wants us to appraise. So I take the gloves out of my pocket and lean over and remove the drawings—”